San Lorenzo: A Synagogue Legend and the August Verbenas

Why is it significant?

Stop in front of this modest parish church, squeezed between apartment blocks on a steep little street. Nothing about it shouts for attention, and yet the most stubborn legend of Lavapiés is attached to exactly this spot.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop in front of this modest parish church, squeezed between apartment blocks on a steep little street. Nothing about it shouts for attention, and yet the most stubborn legend of Lavapiés is attached to exactly this spot.

Nobody really knows where the name Lavapiés comes from, and in old documents it often appears as Avapiés. Popular tradition has a lovely answer: this was the Jewish quarter of medieval Madrid, people washed their feet in a fountain in the square below before entering the synagogue, and that synagogue stood right where this church of San Lorenzo rises, converted after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Historians are sceptical. Madrid's medieval Jewish community was small, and where it actually lived is still debated. But the legend is so beloved that it has become part of the neighbourhood's identity.

What is not a legend is August. Saint Lawrence's day falls on the tenth, and it sits in the middle of the three great summer verbenas of the old quarters: San Cayetano, San Lorenzo and La Paloma, one after another in the hottest weeks of the year. The streets are hung with paper lanterns and flowered shawls, and Madrileños dress up as chulapos and chulapas: the men in checked waistcoats and tight flat caps, the women in long dresses with a carnation in their hair. Then they dance the chotis, a slow, close dance in which, the saying goes, a good couple can turn on a single brick.

And the verbena has its own menu. Limonada, a sweet punch of wine, lemon and fruit that is far stronger than its innocent name suggests. Barquilleros selling rolled wafers from a red drum topped with a little roulette wheel. And for the brave, gallinejas and entresijos, crisp fried lamb innards, the most fearless street food in Madrid and a speciality of the south of the city.

If you ever come back on a night in August, follow the music, and you will find this quiet street unrecognisable. For the last stop, walk north, uphill, toward the Plaza de Antón Martín, where a pink and cream façade on Calle de Santa Isabel hides a cinema of dreams.